Ready-to-eat cereals are well known and popular food items. Ready-to-eat (“R-T-E”) or breakfast cereals come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, compositions, and flavors. Of long standing popularity are traditional R-T-E cereals including unpuffed products such as whole wheat flakes, or corn flakes, and puffed cereals, including oat based puffed O's. Traditionally, the products have been and are prepared by extended cook steps which develop flavorful, fully cooked cereal flavors. While popular, R-T-E cereals having a traditional, fully developed cereal flavor characteristic of long cooking, typically have high sodium content. The sodium content not only is important to the cereal flavor development during the extended cooking step, but also, salt acts as a strong flavor potentiator in the finished cereal product. Also, salt improves color generation and reduces required cook times.
Sodium chloride concentrations of from 2% to 4% have been typically used in the past for R-T-E cereal compositions. Current nutritional and health awareness regarding prepared consumer food products continue to include concerns regarding sodium intake. Producers continue to develop low sodium or reduced sodium variants of their products that provide lower sodium levels while maintaining as best as they can the acceptably salty flavors. Due to the current health focus on sodium in the diet, however, present food industry trends have been to express salt content as milligrams sodium per serving, often one ounce (dry weight) of product. In these units, a popular brand of traditional whole wheat flakes has in the past contained as much as 480 milligrams sodium per ounce of product (i.e., about 3% sodium chloride in the product formula).
Salt reduction is desirable from a reduction in sodium dietary intake standpoint, the dietary benefits of reduced sodium intake has been seen as being achieved at the expense in the decline of benefits such as decline in the desirable taste, appearance and physical properties of the finished product. The finished low sodium breakfast cereal products can have less salty, cooked cereal and toasting flavors, a bland taste and also may be lighter in color. Together, these negative changes in products attributes lead to lower product quality and risk of lower consumer acceptance for a staple food category that plays an important role in a healthy diet. Further, the low sodium breakfast cereal can be more brittle leading to increased breakage and processing losses due to excessive fines generation. The finished products can exhibit less expansion and thus are harder and less tender in eating quality. While not noticeable to the consumer, sodium chloride reduction can also result in increased processing costs to the consumer food product manufacturer due to increased cook times. Increased cook times lead to increases in capital, labor and operating costs especially energy leading to higher product costs.
Various efforts have been made over the years to reduce the sodium content of R-T-E cereals while nonetheless maintaining, insofar as possible, the desirable popular flavor of such products. Conventionally, such approaches have been to substitute other cations (e.g., potassium and/or ammonium) for sodium, to increase the cooking step, to add flavor precursors, to increase minor flavor constituents, e.g., malt, and or to add sugars for browning (see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,963,373 “R-T-E Cereal Composition and Method of Preparation” issued Oct. 16, 1990 to Fan et al.) to offset the lack of color development. These approaches have met with some success in reducing the overall sodium content to about 300 milligrams sodium per ounce, while suffering some trade-offs with regard to flavor. In other approaches, the reduced sodium chloride content is partitioned between a first portion being part of the cooked cereal formulation and a second portion being topically applied for maximum flavor and salty taste impact (See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,988,521 Ready-To-Eat Cereal of Reduced Sodium Content and Method of Preparation” issued Jan. 29, 1991 to Fan et al.).
A conventional approach is to provide all or a portion of the sodium chloride with a non-sodium salt especially potassium chloride (“KCL”) or other salts. However, many consumers are sensitive to a bitter flavor associated with KCl. For this reason, the art has long sought techniques to reduce the negative taste of KCl (see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,596,333 “Dietary Salt Substitute” issued May 1952) such as blending with flavor masking additives or employing other potassium salts. (See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,206,049 “Choline-Containing Compositions as Salt Substitutes and Enhancers and a method of Preparation issued Apr. 27, 1993 to Fielding et al.)
In other approaches, various salty flavor ingredients have been developed as “salt enhancers” that enhance the saltiness perception of any salt or sodium chloride in a food product.
Notwithstanding all the attempts to provide salt (sodium chloride) substitutes, salt enhancers or salt mimics, saltiness perceptions remains primarily dose responsive, i.e., add more salt/increase salt concentration and the product tastes saltier; reduce salt addition and the product is less salty tasting. Thus, still another approach is for producers to gradually reduce the sodium chloride level in familiar products such that over time, consumers' tastes are gradually weaned away from higher salt levels to lower salt levels.
Still another approach is to partition the sodium chloride content with a first portion being a part of the body of a food product piece and with a second portion being topically applied to its surface. By such partitioning between body and surface, the sodium chloride level can be reduced while maintaining saltiness taste perception. The product still employs sodium chloride, but the position of that sodium chloride can be used to influence saltiness perception. (See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,988,521 “Ready-To-Eat Cereal of Reduced Sodium Content and method of Preparation issued Jan. 29, 1991 to S. T. Fan). Of course, such a technique can be employed with one or more other sodium reduction techniques, e.g., using KCl in full or partial substitution.
Notwithstanding past efforts at providing reduced sodium consumer food products, there is a continuing need for new and useful techniques to provide low sodium food products, especially breakfast cereal products, that enhance saltiness taste perception thereby either increasing saltiness at specific sodium chloride concentrations or allowing reductions in sodium chloride concentrations (and thereby in sodium levels or loads) while maintain equivalent levels of salty taste and cereal flavor.